The one Aerosmith song Joe Perry thought was completely wrong for the band: “A waste of time”
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 14 December 2025 18:28, UK
Rock and roll has never been made up of perfect songs. Even though the genre has created the most indelible anthems of the modern age, the final product usually has more than a few technical foul-ups that add a human element to the song rather than sounding robotically stiff. Although Joe Perry has always thrived on that live energy when working with Aerosmith, he admitted that one of their pop crossovers took things too far in the other direction.
Then again, the thought of Perry returning to Aerosmith in the early 1980s felt like a pipedream. After working on some of the band’s greatest material with frontman Steven Tyler, a massive fight between him and Tyler over his wife led to him quitting the group after a massive stadium show, going on to form The Joe Perry Project in the next few years.
Once the band started floundering and Perry started to lose his battle with addiction, his next wife convinced him to make amends with his writing partner. While the group’s reunion album Done With Mirrors wasn’t the comeback they wanted, their collaboration with Run-DMC led to them being recognised as one of the kings of hair metal, dominating the charts with songs like ‘Rag Doll’.
As the band entered the 1990s, they found their footing as one of the biggest names in rock by pivoting towards ballads, with ‘Crazy’ and ‘Cryin’ becoming the most celebrated songs in their discography. Once the group made the soundtrack anthem ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’ for Armageddon, Tyler began getting a horrible idea.
For the next few albums, the group would spend their time chasing after that kind of paycheque, with many of their songs having an anthemic quality that didn’t quite align with their bluesy aesthetic. Although the band begrudgingly worked their way through the next album, Just Push Play, Perry wasn’t willing to bend when it came time to record the song ‘Girls of Summer’.
Included as a bonus track on the final version of the album, the song practically has the year 2001 pre-stamped, sounding like a classic rock band trying their best to sound hip with the new kids on the block like Britney Spears and *NSYNC. While Tyler was the only one enthusiastic about the tune, Perry would have been happy never to play the song again.
In his memoir Rocks, Perry talked about how embarrassing it was having to play the song, saying, “Steven became enamoured of something called ‘Girls of Summer’. I put guitar on it. But a few overdubs doesn’t change the guts of a song. I thought it was a waste of time and wrong for an Aerosmith record. I suggested that Steven save it for a solo album, but [he] prevailed, and the song was recorded.”
There are a lot of moments a musician would rather forget in their lives, but this one track seems to have been a blot on Perry’s career that he wishes he could delete from not only his own record but the discography of Aerosmith.
By the time the group had begun the promo cycle for the song, Perry had washed his hands of the tune, with no one except Tyler appearing in the accompanying video. While the song would mark the poppiest era the band had ever been in, they would spend the next few years getting back in touch with their roots, performing a record featuring a slew of blues covers from their early days entitled Honkin’ On Bobo. Every artist might try to reach for different influences, but ‘Girls of Summer’ was when Aerosmith started turning themselves into a pop band.
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